A truly beautiful country … And a people who are united though they deny it. They are united despite the wide variety of country and city, of sectional interests, of political differences, of diverse scenery or regional accent or intellectual level or financial achievement; united by a past they cannot escape. It is a unity beyond the work ethic for which they are so justly famous; it is the unity of guilt. It is a feeling of guilt so strong as to demonstrate itself at times in terror; a guilt so violently denied as to prove the truth of its existence. But it is not, as many believe, the guilt for the excesses of the Third Reich. It is the guilt of having lost a war and a winnable war at that. Few Jews can enter Germany without feeling uncomfortable by the national aura of blameless guilt; they are the destroyed victor embarrassed before the guilt of the rich and powerful vanquished. But the lovely flowers in the beautiful gardens cannot overcome the stench of the death camps thirty years after; the newly laid mortar cannot hide the crumbling souls who still stare out with frightened eyes through the electrified fences that were torn down so long ago.
